A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  “Now you are being asked to judge this mother. To pass the ultimate judgment on her. To decide whether she is a murderer. In passing that judgment, you may be inclined to make a series of smaller judgments because it makes the ultimate judgment a little easier. That eighteen is too young to get married, the way my client did. That eighteen is too young to get pregnant, the way my client did. That once married and a mother, at nineteen, it was my client’s responsibility to get out of her abusive relationship for the sake of her daughter. That the situation in which she found herself was a situation of her own making.

  “You can’t take any of these shortcuts, though, to find my client guilty of first-degree murder.”

  Abby looks down at Luz for a moment and smooths a piece of flyaway hair, before returning her hand to Luz’s shoulder. “There is no relationship in this life more sacred, more formative, and more vital to our survival than the relationship we have with our mothers. No other relationship even comes close.

  “I think we can all agree on that.” Abby nods once, sees one of the stay-at-home moms nod back ever so slightly. “And I think we can all agree that in the end what makes a person a good mother is her ability to protect her child from harm, from grave injury, from death.

  “My client told you she was afraid her husband was going to pick up their tiny baby and throw her against the wall. Think about that.” Abby raises her voice. “Think about that. Her child’s fragile skull slamming against a flat hard surface and smashing.” Abby walks rapidly to The Well, reaches into the crib, picks up the doll by her plastic arm and hurls her across the room. The doll hits the side of the jury box with a sharp crack then slides sideways, her painted face now looking over her back, one leg askew.

  Abby hears a few gasps from the gallery, a thrum of murmurs. “Think about that,” she repeats fiercely. “Wouldn’t you expect a good mother to do anything she could to stop it from happening? Wouldn’t any one of you? My client acted in defense of her own life and of the life of her child. She did a terrible thing. She took her husband’s life, and that’s why she feels guilty. Mi culpa. My fault. Ms. Gooden wants to rest the government’s case on those two words. But feeling guilty and being guilty are two different things. This wasn’t a choice. My client had no choice.”

  Abby takes a long, steadying breath. She had not let herself look out into the gallery before, but she does now. It is packed, not a sliver of space on the benches. There are people standing shoulder to shoulder along the back wall. Some she recognizes, from her office and Shauna’s, or the press gaggle. But many are strangers drawn by the celebrity of the case, hungry to experience the drama firsthand. To a person, they are staring at her, waiting for what is coming next.

  Slowly, she walks to the jury rail and leans over it, just as Shauna had done. “Some of you may have doubt. I understand that. You may doubt that it is a pure case of self-defense. You may believe that my client acted out of jealousy. You may believe this is a crime of passion. Or you may believe that my client acted in self-defense, but that she overreacted. You may believe that she used too much force. That she didn’t have to kill her husband.”

  Abby looks at each juror in turn. “But here’s the thing. My client isn’t on trial for manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide. Even if you believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that my client is guilty of something as serious as second-degree murder, you cannot convict her. There is one charge before you and one charge only—cold-blooded, premeditated, first-degree murder. That’s it. She’s either guilty or not guilty of that single count. You have no other options.”

  Abby puts her hands together. “Please understand. I am telling you that my client is a good mother. That she killed so that she would not be killed and her daughter would not be killed. But I know that our perspectives may differ. So I will end by reminding you of the law that you swore to follow.

  “You may not like the law. It may seem unfair, even unjust. You may want to compromise. You can’t. When the only choice is first-degree murder, the only verdict is not guilty.”

  Friday, March 23, 2007

  3:02 p.m.

  Office of the Federal Public Defender

  Los Angeles, California

  “How’s the waiting?”

  Abby looks up. Antoine, standing in the open doorway of her office. “Awful. But I’m thinking—”

  “Jury’s coming back Monday, at the earliest.”

  She nods, waving him over as she staples another set of documents, stacks it with the others, and puts them inside a large manila envelope. “Dars will send them home in a few hours and then it’ll be the weekend.”

  Antoine shuts the door, crosses the room in two strides, and takes a seat in the chair opposite Abby’s desk, his own manila envelope in hand. “Doing some work in the meantime, I see. Catching up with your neglected clients?”

  She shakes her head. “Estrada.”

  “He alright?”

  “As good as can be expected. Thinner. Not in any danger, though. The other guys like him. It’s useful having a jailhouse lawyer.” Abby seals the envelope, puts it in her purse. “And you know, now that the case is over, he’s getting out. Dars doesn’t have any basis to hold him anymore.”

  “So what—you’re being a Good Samaritan and helping his lawyer with the release paperwork?”

  She shrugs. “Something like that.”

  “How’s his family been holding up?”

  “There really isn’t any. He and his wife divorced about fifteen years ago. They had one child, a daughter. She was killed in a car accident during her senior year in high school.”

  “Huh. Did you ever think Estrada was going to break?” Antoine is looking at her intently.

  “Not after—No.” She takes a second look at Antoine. “Why? What is it?” She nods toward the envelope in his hand. “What’s in there?”

  “The report on the hard drive. Travis’s emails.”

  Abby reaches for the envelope and pulls out a thick pile of papers. Lines and lines of numbers. Charts. “What am I looking at, Antoine?”

  “Report’s at the end.”

  “Just tell me,” she says impatiently.

  “What do you know about read receipts?” he asks.

  “Read what?”

  “There’s an email tracking system you can use. Shows you when your emails have been opened and read. And if they’ve been opened and read multiple times.”

  “Okay.”

  “So our expert, he looked at Travis’s emails from Jackie. There’s a couple hundred, dating back from October ’05 to a couple of days before he died.”

  “We know that already. Shauna gave us all of them.”

  “Yeah.” Antoine leans forward, elbows on his knees, and laces his fingers together under his chin. “Thing is, each email from Jackie was opened twice. First time it was opened, read, then marked as unread, so the second time it showed up in the inbox just like it was new. With each one, it looks like the first read and the second read happened within hours of each other. Or at most, a day.”

  Abby stares at him, her impatience replaced by creeping dread.

  “Our guy looked at all of Travis’s other emails. Thousands of them. Only Jackie’s have two read receipts.”

  “She was his girlfriend. He read them twice.” But even as she says it, Abby knows it isn’t true.

  “I checked the time stamps on the read receipts against Travis’s schedule,” Antoine says. “Travis was out on patrol for every first read.”

  She shakes her head. “He wouldn’t give Luz his password. Not when he was having an affair.”

  “His user name is travishollis. His password is his birthday. I’m thinking she guessed on the first try.”

  “No one’s that stupid.”

  “Please. Jonathan’s been reading your email for years.”

  “No, he—” Her eyes
widen. “Oh, God.”

  Antoine shakes his head. “All it takes with most people is knowing them well—a few guesses and you’re in.”

  She stares at him.

  “What I am telling you,” he says patiently, “is that Luz was reading about Travis and Jackie in real time. She always knew. Jackie’s email to Luz wasn’t a surprise at all. She knew about it all—the baby, the affair. For months.”

  Abby is shaking her head.

  “Almost a year.”

  Abby closes her eyes. “What’s the time lapse between the first email from Jackie to Travis and the first call from Luz to Estrada?”

  “Two months. Luz’s first call to Estrada was on December 8, 2005.”

  She nods. Had it been closer in time, Shauna would have been suspicious, but Luz had waited. “She didn’t call Estrada until—”

  “She found out she was pregnant,” Antoine finishes. “Then she called him nine more times. Meanwhile—”

  “Meanwhile legal documents were being signed and executed.” No confrontation with Travis until after Cristina was safely delivered from Luz’s body. No confrontation with Travis until after Luz’s name was on the life insurance policy.

  She thinks of Mr. Estrada, then again to what Luz had said. He told me to trust you. So if you want to know those things now, I will tell you. But Abby had not wanted to know. She had had another chance to find out, when she had met Luz in her office, ostensibly to talk about Jackie. Abby still had not wanted to know. She had never wanted to know.

  “Jackie’s email to Luz,” Abby says slowly. “Luz couldn’t have known about that, much less planned it.”

  “No, but she could have planned for it. She’s keeping up with their correspondence, and Jackie’s making threats. Luz knew Travis wasn’t going anywhere, which means she knew Jackie was going to get fed up at some point and tell all.”

  “The Facebook posting on October 11.”

  Antoine looks at her blankly.

  “The memory picture of Luz sitting on Travis’ lap at the picnic when she was pregnant with Cristina.” Abby looks back at Antoine, who is now nodding slightly.

  “Oh God. Luz was using Facebook to—”

  “Make Jackie crazy-mad.”

  “She set this whole thing in motion.”

  Abby looks at Antoine for a long moment. “You’ve been sitting on this report for days, haven’t you?”

  Antoine looks back at her, expressionless.

  She nods. “You didn’t want to pollute my mind with the inconvenient fact that my client is a cold-blooded, premeditated—”

  “No, I don’t like those labels, never have.” Antoine shakes his head. “But one thing I do know, is Cristina, that’s her life. If Luz thinks something isn’t good for Cristina, something’s going to jeopardize her being Cristina’s entire world, she is going to see it as something to get rid of.”

  The brutal truth of that statement cuts through Abby like a frigid wind. “So you hid the report because what, you thought I couldn’t handle it?”

  “I didn’t think you needed to handle it. There’s been a lot going on. And this would not have helped.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I’m telling you now. Abby, you did your best. Better than your best. And like I said, my money is on you. My money is always on you. But if our girl goes down, I hope you remember that we had this conversation.”

  She takes a deep breath, picks up the report again. “Is this the original?”

  “Yes.”

  “You make any copies?”

  “No.”

  Abby swivels in her chair, bends down, and feeds the report to the shredder. They both listen as the machine whirs to life, watch as it sluices out paper spaghettini.

  A wave of dizziness comes over Abby, similar to what she felt in the early days of her pregnancy. Like a carsick passenger, she straightens, keeping her eyes fixed on the horizon line, in this case the blank wall space directly in front of her. Images move in and out of focus: Cal’s face on her screen saver, Rayshon’s picture on the wall, Nic’s eyes on her, staring up from the couch when she’d tiptoed from the house that morning in stockinged feet, holding her shoes.

  “Hey. Abby. Look at me.”

  Slowly, she turns back to face Antoine, his face swimming, then coming into focus.

  “Guys like Travis Hollis, they need a killing.”

  She presses her locket into the base of her neck. “Do you think that justifies what she did? Oh, my God, Antoine. Look at what she did.”

  “You would have done it,” he says. “For Cal.”

  They look at each other for a long moment, interrupted by the ringing of her office phone from a blocked number. Abby’s heart stops. She picks up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “The jury—” the clerk begins, but Abby cuts her off, her eyes on Antoine.

  “They have a question?”

  “A verdict.”

  Abby looks at the clock, then back at Antoine. “A verdict,” she repeats, and in an instant, Antoine is out of his chair, phone in hand, texting, then out the door. “But,” she says helplessly into the receiver, “it’s been less than an hour. Don’t they even—don’t they even want to take the weekend to think it over?”

  There is silence on the other end of the phone.

  “I’ve never had a verdict that fast,” Abby babbles, “and not—I mean, it’s a murder trial. This can’t be—this can’t be...” She puts her hand over her mouth to smother the final word. Good. This can’t be good.

  A pause, and then the clerk says, almost apologetically, “It was just the one count, you know?” And then, “Judge Ducey wants you here right away.”

  * * *

  Luz is curled up on the floor in the corner of Jonathan’s office—he had offered it to her before heading out for court on one of his own cases. Cristina is asleep in her pop-out car seat. As Abby gets closer she realizes that Luz is asleep, too, her arm flung over Cristina’s body.

  Abby kneels down, brushes Luz’s hair off her face. “Luz,” she says softly, “you have to get up now.”

  Luz blinks, and Abby forces herself to wait while her eyes focus. “What is it?”

  “We have to go back to court. The jury decided.”

  Luz pushes herself into a sitting position. “But you said it might be days. You said they were going home for the weekend.” Her fingers wrap around Abby’s forearm, the nails digging in.

  “I was wrong.”

  Abby tries to keep her gaze steady as Luz searches her face. “You think it’s guilty. That’s what you think.”

  “I don’t know. But we have got to prepare for the possibility that—”

  “No.”

  Blood beads appear on the soft skin above the inside of Abby’s wrist as Luz bears down. Abby takes a breath. “Luz, we have to talk about Cristina and we don’t have much time. Father Abelard is in my office now, he’s going to take care of her until—”

  “No.”

  The blood is sliding down Abby’s arm now, dripping onto her stockinged knee. “We have your signature on the guardianship papers. The other paperwork we needed to go to court for and we didn’t have time. But Mr. Estrada is getting out any minute now. Once that happens, we’ll deal with the rest of it.”

  Luz is shaking her head. “Even if it is guilty, there will be an appeal. I can stay out on my bond. I’ve never violated.”

  “There is no bail pending appeal. Not for this kind of crime. The prosecutor will ask the judge that you be taken into custody immediately.” Abby hates herself right now. This conversation should have happened days ago. But in the ensuing madness—Maria Elena’s death, Luz’s disastrous performance on cross, Abby’s near-jailing, the barreling toward closing argument—explaining the consequences had dropped out of her mind. There hadn’t been ti
me to think. To tell her client, If they convict you of first-degree murder, you will not be walking out of the courtroom afterward. You will never go outside again.

  “Luz,” she says, “I need you to—”

  But Luz has thrown herself on Abby, and she now has to struggle to stay upright. Then Luz smacks Abby’s face, her wedding ring hitting her mouth. “No, no, no.” Luz’s voice is a strangled whisper, then a scream. Cristina starts to cry, then wail. The sound temporarily distracts Luz and Abby grabs hold of her shoulders, pinning her to the wall, their faces inches apart. Abby’s lip is stinging and she tastes blood in her mouth.

  “Stop it.” Abby has to raise her voice above the baby’s crying. Luz is struggling to get free, and Abby tightens her grip. Finally, Luz stops fighting. Her body falls forward, chin to her chest, and suddenly Abby has to use all of her strength to hold Luz up, her arm tickling as the blood continues to slide down.

  “Look at me.” But Luz won’t. Cristina continues to wail.

  Abby’s eyes are burning and her throat aches. “Listen to me now,” she says, and she is talking to both of them. “Listen to what I am telling you. I’m going to the bathroom to try to fix what you did. You have a few minutes.”

  She tilts Luz’s face upward and presses her uninjured cheek to Luz’s forehead like she’s checking for a fever. “This was your decision. I let you make it. I let you make it,” she repeats as Luz begins to cry and Cristina screams.

  * * *

  Downstairs Will waits with Antoine, his mind going in a thousand directions at once. It’s hard to think, hard to see almost. He presses his palms against his eyes, blinks a few times. The lobby is bustling with lawyers and secretaries, some headed home early, but when they see Luz and Abby step out of the elevator, they go quiet, instinctively clearing a path for them.